Tuesday Was A Hollow Victory For The GOP

As projected, Republicans took control of the Senate as well as the House on Tuesday. But many of those GOP Senate candidates who squeaked into office are, in my view, political philanderers – by which I mean that while they pledge their troth to conservative principles, they still carry on outrageous affairs with Big Government. And frankly it’s no surprise that many voters would rather continue an unhappy marriage to Barack Obama rather than indulge in a one-night stand with false-dealing Republicans.

So while we are going to see a Republican Congress in name in January, its small-government rhetoric is certainly not going to fool or win over the party base. In 2014, the American public has shown that it hates Washington, D.C., and the Republican leaders in Washington are demonstrating why. They have assembled a team of strategists, consultants, and other political operatives who eat, breathe, and sleep Washington, D.C. Instead of standing for something, they stand for anything they think might get them back into power.

The message from Washington’s Republican elite is no longer that government is the problem, but that Democrats in charge of government are the problem. That might work in 2014, but it’s not going to carry the day in the next presidential election. Republicans cannot make the case that government is the problem when they covet the power of controlling it to the extent they do.

This election cycle is only the latest iteration of an old story by which Republican consultants and establishment types have gotten rich and, in doing so, have impoverished the conservative movement—all the while losing important elections that could determine the future of our country. In 2008 the Democrats brought in a fresh face not of Washington as their nominee, while the Republicans reached all the way back to 2000, had a replay of the same old fights, then nominated their own establishment candidate, John McCain, who happened to have been the loser in the 2000 primary struggle. He lost again.

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The events of 2012 amounted to a recycling of this story. The GOP refought the 2008 primary cycle with the 2008 loser (Mitt Romney) becoming the 2012 winner. He lost the general election and the consultants again got rich. In November of 2012, housed together on the fifth floor of 66 Canal Center Plaza in Alexandria, Va., nine separate Republican campaign organizations that had collaborated on the Romney loss raked in cash: Crossroads Media, Black Rock Group, WWP Strategies, Restore Our Future, Targeted Victory, DDC Advocacy/Blue Front Strategies, Target Point Consulting, Digital Franking, and Americans for Job Security.

It doesn’t seem to matter much that the political track record of this GOP consultancy-industrial complex is execrable. Targeted Victory, LLC—which was co-founded by Michael Beach, the “national victory director” for the Republican Party during the 2008 campaign—played a key role in the development of “Project ORCA,” the now infamous Romney technology effort to win in 2012. It failed spectacularly. The manager of that effort for Targeted Victory was Tony Feather, who is now the “F” in FLS Connect, a powerhouse Republican consulting firm that handles much of the GOP’s voter contact. The “L” in FLS is Jeff Larson, who had been chief of staff for the Republican National Committee. FLS Connect also, at one time, employed Rich Beeson, who also worked at the RNC and went on to become Mitt Romney’s political director.

Understanding the incestuous ties between Republican consultants—the unending referrals of business between these friendly and insular consultant cliques—and the group think they promote is vital to comprehending the Republican predicament in 2014. Many of the groups that profited from Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 are now helping Republicans in 2014. Ron Bonjean, who worked for former establishment Republican leaders like Dennis Hastert and Trent Lott and is also a partner at a bipartisan firm, Singer Bonjean Strategies, in September took up an independent position with the NRSC. (The “Singer” in that firm, by the way, would be one Phil Singer, who worked for Chuck Schumer and served as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s communications director in 2006.)

The coveting of power for the sake of power and consultant-led group think have misdirected the GOP to strategic blunder after blunder.

In North Carolina, the GOP hedged its bets behind the candidate who most looked like the men already hanging out at their Capitol Hill Club. Thom Tillis, speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, managed to pull off a victory, but it was in spite of himself and more because of voter unhappiness with the incumbent. North Carolina voters appeared sold on Tillis only because he was not Sen. Kay Hagan. His campaign struggled, even after taking advice from the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

In Kansas, instead of suggesting that Pat Roberts retire, Republicans in Washington rallied to keep the old establishment warhorse. The Washington Republicans’ treatment of Roberts stands in stark contrast to what they did to conservative Sen. Jim Bunning, who was quickly dispatched in 2010’s Kentucky race in favor of Trey Grayson. Grayson, of course, went on to lose the primary to Rand Paul.

Roberts does not live in Kansas. He has spent most of his time on the campaign trail touting his Washington endorsements. Press reports note that he did not even have an internet connection in his campaign office until a few weeks after the primary. But the Republicans in Washington thought he was a safer pick than finding a fresh face.

In numerous other states the Republican Party has had a hard time rallying voters to its side on its issues. The Republicans who won on Tuesday did so as anti-Barack Obama candidates, not as Republicans with an agenda worth supporting. There are three reasons for this failure, all of which directly derive from the mistakes made by the same pool of GOP-commissioned consultants who win whether the party wins or loses.

First, in the Mississippi primary, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Chamber of Commerce, and other affiliated groups made a decision to run a ruthless campaign against the Republican base. Conservative activists were called racists and bigots. Conservative organizations were accused of profiting off the races — something psychologists would term “projection.” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared the tea party candidates challenging Washington’s picks would be ruthlessly stamped out.

Republicans in Washington who declared war on their very base are now shocked that conservative voters have little interest or motivation in helping Pat Roberts, Thom Tillis, David Perdue, or a host of other candidates. A Republican establishment that has spent several years badmouthing Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and outside groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund now find themselves openly begging the Senate Conservatives Fund to engage in races while they fly Ted Cruz around the country to motivate the base.

Second, the Washington Republicans decided to stand behind insiders and creatures of Washington at a time when Americans across the country, regardless of party, have come loathe Washington and the insiders who feed off it. In September, a Washington Post/ABC poll showed that 47 percent of voters “strongly disapprove” of the GOP, and 72 percent of Americans generally disapprove of the congressional GOP. Despite these numbers we saw almost no new faces running. Ed Gillespie, a lobbyist and former RNC Chairman, was the GOP’s struggling candidate in Virginia. Pat Roberts is their guy in Kansas. Thom Tillis struggled in North Carolina, though he ultimately won, as the Washington Republicans’ pick.

In Georgia, one of the few new faces to manage to oust the establishment GOP in the primaries, David Perdue, struggled to win in a close race. The Georgia Republicans had consolidated behind long-time congressman Jack Kingston, and Perdue used that to his advantage running as an outsider. But, as Republicans have seen for more than a decade, rich, self-funding candidates like Perdue usually do badly in elections. Perdue, who lives in the gated community on a gated private island, had trouble connecting with voters while the Democrats have outspent him on Atlanta airwaves attacking him for outsourcing jobs. Perdue’s best argument for himself was that he was not a proxy for Barack Obama’s agenda. It’s just not enough.

And that brings us to the third issue. Republican strategists entrenched in the beltway, covetous of power for the sake of power, have no agenda other than “We are not Barack Obama.” It fell to outside groups to carry most of the Republican water on the anti-Obamacare campaign. Likewise, third-party groups have been most vocal on securing the border, while the Republican establishment played it safe.

On Nov. 3, Alexander Burns wrote in Politico that Republican leaders were preparing “with growing confidence … to argue that broad GOP gains in the House and Senate would represent a top-to-bottom validation of their party’s mainline wing.” But when 47 percent of Americans “strongly disapprove” of the Republican Party, it’s hard to find validation—especially when there’s no real Republican message to validate other than we-are-not-Obama. The sole validation to be found there is that Americans reject the president while still hating the same leaders of the GOP whom voters punished in 2006.

When David Brat shocked the political class by beating Rep. Eric Cantor earlier this year, Republicans should have taken it as a warning sign that their candidates needed to campaign against Washington instead of promising what Washington could do if only Republicans were in charge. The Republican consultant class, in an act of self-protection, quickly convinced everyone that Cantor had lost because of Democratic cross-over votes. Now, while Democrats spend money on voter mobilization, the very same Republican consultants who got rich off their losses in 2006, 2008, and 2012 are making killer commissions on mail and media buys.

Republicans did well on Election Day. The president’s job approval has cratered. The GOP outperforms the President on a host of issues from the economy to handling terror threats. But Washington’s Republican establishment made a conscious decision to find candidates who looked and sounded more like them and less like the Americans whose votes they need. They have provided no alternative and took far longer to close the deal with voters than they should have. When the voting closed on Tuesday, Republicans did not so much win as Democrats lost.

And so the message is plain: The GOP celebration will be brief. When the new Republican Congress convenes next year, tries to lead, and looks over its shoulder, there won’t be many conservatives following.

Erick Erickson is editor-in-chief of the conservative blog site RedState.com.